I had the privilege of presenting at Ideagoras November 17, 2011 in Madrid. Our hosts, the BBVA Center for Innovation, were gracious enough to provide two simultaneous translators which made it possible for me, a non-Spanish speaker, to participate fully in the conference.

The translation not only allowed me to listen and learn, it also allowed me to participate in the conversation using the hashtag, #ideagoras. This being a social media in healthcare conference, at the end of the day, the organizer, Angel Gonzales sent out a link with the analytics of what happened on Twitter the days surrounding the conference. 

http://www.foxepractice.com/healthcare-hashtags/Ideagoras/

Having an official hashtag for a conference does change the experience of the attendees as well as people who are following the conversation remotely. There were only about 100 people at the venue but there were 424 unique Twitter accounts that used the hashtag that day, extending the reach of the ideas beyond the four walls.

The official hashtag also allowed the attendees to interact with each other on a deeper level. As a speaker I got to answer questions and go deeper on topics via tweets that I could only touch on due to time constraints.

If you are planning a conference, find a unique and short official hashtag, print it on any agendas or materials, and encourage your attendees to use it. After the conference, use a tool like that found on www.foxpractice.com or http://hootsuite.com/ to analyze the Twitter activity, it's one of many conference metrics that you can use to plan the next conference or give to sponsors. 

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Found some old photos of the Medicine 2.0 panel on social media in healthcare I was on with Jen McCabe, Rob Fraser, Saad Alaam, chaired by Adalsteinn Brown, Assistant Deputy Minister of the Ontario Minister of Health and Long-Term Care a few years ago in Toronto. 

Coverage of the panel on the official Medicine 2.0 blog: http://medicine20congress.blogspot.com/2009/09/blogs-eviscerating-pride-and-p...

Find the list of presentations from Medicine 2.0 2009 here.

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I've spoken and written a lot in the past few years about social marketing and the principals underneath are pretty simple. Have a good product. Treat your customers well. Without those two solid foundations supporting your brand, it's extremely difficult to get traction. Here's a personal story of my experience with Apple and Verizon. It's pretty clear who will get my business and praise in the future.

I made the switch from my EVO to a Verizon iPhone 4 last week and it's the first Apple iPhone/iPod that I bought. It's also one of my first experiences at the Apple Store when I had a technical problem. My switch to Mac's had started at various startups a few years ago where a Macbook was standard issue. I got used to the ease of use in the Apple experience, since as I've gotten older, I became a fan of something I once said to a friend of mine regarding his 3 vehicles in various states of disrepair, "You know James, most of the time I just want to get from A to B, I don't really care how I get there, nor do I want to have to fix just one part to get there."

Rewind about 25 years, to my first experiences with electronics.

The first home computer that we had was and Apple IIe bought by my father in the late 80's. I remember making the turtle move with BASIC and the green screen but I can't say that I was very attached to the machine itself. By the time I was 15, I had fallen in with the technical crowd at school who were hacking their own PC's out of parts ordered from San Jose, California. California was a pretty exotic place to a bunch of teenagers from rural New York. My first major purchase at age 16, for $1008, was a cloned PC with 16 MB of RAM. It came in the mail from Silicon Valley and over the next few years I upgraded the memory, the graphics card, and the motherboard. We sneered derisively at the Mac fanboys (we only knew them from the online BBS's, there were none at my high school) who could not swap out cards, change their motherboard, or customize their machines. 

By the time I was 18, I was immersed in Usenet newsgroups and local BBS's. Apple was still seen by me and everyone I respected as an operating system for the non-hardcore geek-wanna-be who couldn't get into the guts of their own machine. Apple fanboys were on par with AOL users, the latter were seen as the "end of the Internet as we knew it".

Fast forward to February 10th, 2011. I was going to go into a store to buy a Verizon iPhone. I was already immersed in the Apple experience, having bought my own Macbook about a year before and had won an iPad at a raffle. Owning the iPhone would be the final piece of the Apple experience. I wasn't sure how I felt about it, but Roving Screens needed all the test devices we could get our hands on and we also needed to make sure Mobimileage did not behave differently on a CDMA network.

The Best Buy employee transferred my data over from the HTC EVO 4G and got about 4000 entries. I know I don't have 4000 people's phone numbers in my phone but I wasn't sure how many I really had.

It turned out the high number of contacts is due to Google's crazy idea of what constitutes a phone contact. Here's how the Android OS handles contacts: it assume that anyone you've ever emailed from Gmail, every Twitter and Facebook friend is the same as a phone contact. (note to any Google engineers reading this: a phone contact is a lot more personal than someone I may or may not have emailed from Gmail, a Twitter follower, or a college friend who found me on Facebook) I ended up with quadruples of many contacts since if I have your phone number, it's likely that I've emailed you, follow you on Twitter, and we are friends on Facebook. We made some changes to the EVO's settings and he did the transfer again, eliminating the quadruples problem but I still had about 2000 entries. I wasn't sure if I had 2000 phone contacts but given that I had already been in the store for an hour, I did a quick spot check that everyone's information was in the new iPhone and left the store.

Two days later, as I'm searching through my phone, I realized that there were still duplicates. Worse, 1700 Twitter contacts were in the iPhone, basically as blank names with no other information. I was in downtown Palo Alto at the time and decided to visit the local Verizon store, since they were now going to be getting my $100+ per month instead of Sprint.

The girl at the counter took both my phones, the EVO and the iPhone. We unsync'd Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and tried to transfer just my phone contacts over. I waited for about half an hour while she tried the transfer a few different ways in the back- and at the end she handed back my phone with triplicate entries and 4000 contacts. She said that she couldn't help me and that they were helping me as a courtesy since I had not purchased the iPhone from their store. "We usually charge $20 for this transfer service. You'll just have to go through the (now 4000) entries and delete them on your own. I'm not sure if you can do this on your computer but if not you can go through them individually on your phone. Or maybe you can take it to the Apple Store and they can help you."

Wow. That was the worst customer service ever. Verizon's customer service rep's made the problem WORSE and walked away.

I walked the 3 blocks to the Apple Store and was approached by someone immediately after walking in. He asked why I came to the store today and I told him about my issues with transferring my contacts over. I didn't have an appointment but Peter Song, one of the Genius Bar employees said, "We should be able to figure this out." First he looked at the list of phones his Cellbright machine supported; it turned out the HTC EVO was not one of them. Next he tried the HTC sync to get just the phone contacts. His computer locked up. In between his other appointments, he came back to see if the next sync'ing system would get just the 400 phone contacts. No dice. 

He then asked me, "Does this have an SD card in it?" and I said, "Yes, there's a micro-SD card that I've used to transfer photos." He transferred just the phone contacts on to the card, put the card into a reader, connected to the Mac, and transferred just the phone contacts on to the iPhone.

Five minutes later, I walked out with all of the data I wanted on my new phone and Apple gained another fanboy based on superior customer service.

If you're working on branding or marketing for a consumer facing company, here are the thoughts that I have, as a consumer:

• When my Verizon phone contract is up, would I hesitate for a nanosecond before jumping to whoever offers me a better deal? No.
• If Apple comes out with their next device, would I look and consider buying it? You bet.

If Apple just had good customer service that wouldn't have been enough to turn me into a fan but having a good product AND excellent customer service was.

On top of the amount I will spend on electronics in the future, think about the positive or negative advice I will give to family and friends when they ask me how I like Verizon or my new iPhone and how my story will influence their buying decisions. This is advertising and loyalty that money can't buy.

Follow me on Twitter: @chiah

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Yesterday the first Gamification Summit convened in San Francisco bringing together many different segments of the Silicon Valley technology market. The "Game Crawl" organized by TechCentralSF after the conference gave attendees a chance to mingle. The most surprising part of the event was the large cross section of industries represented. There was the expected influx of game and startup executives but also NBC, Playboy Enterprises, a program insurance company, and healthcare companies.

Gamification is seen by these executives as the new loyalty program and a way to keep users/consumers engaged. Social engagement is no longer seen to be enough, adding game mechanics and metrics is the new thing in the next year for brands.

Powering these new take on loyalty programs are two startups that sponsored the pub crawl.

Badgeville described their business as a white label social rewards and analytics platform, a new twist on the traditional loyalty program. Now you can reward consumers not just for purchases but also desired behaviors like "sharing with social network" or "uploading content".

Bunchball has been building its platform for the past 4 years and power programs for large brands like NBC, Comcast, USA Networks,SyFy, and Hasbro. The API's make it easy to plug in a game, leaderboards, and integration with social networks.

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I've been tweeting about how I use different Social Media networks and decided I should have a longer post about all the thoughts I have on the topic instead of doling it out in 140 character disjointed thoughts. Before I start, I do want to say that this is the way I use the different networks and what has worked for me over the past few years. Your mileage my vary and you may find that another way works better.

First the different services I use on a regular basis:

1. Twitter

Open network, I live-tweet talks, post professional links and some personal information. It's the most open of all the ones I use, since anyone with an internet connection can see everything I post. If someone chooses to, they can even get text updates every time I tweet.

My tendency is to keep the stream professional and to talk to other people on Twitter who are in the industries that I'm involved in.

2. Blogs (Professional at www.thesubtleinfluence.com and Personal at chiah.posterous.com)

Open networks, I blog on social marketing, mobile, communities, healthcare at www.thesubtleinfluence.com and whatever I find interesting at chiah.posterous.com. The personal blog reflects my interests in technology, food, and what I'm looking at that seems relevant to people who know me.

I also guest blog on other properties, usually I match the tone and writing to the style that has already been established.

3. LinkedIn

Professional network of people I've worked with. For me LinkedIn is a way for me to keep track of my professional network.

3. Facebook

The most personal of all the networks that I use. This is where I have more photos, interests, and interact with people I already know.

The way I look at the different networks is how do I want to use them and also what is the social norm on each. Twitter is a large public gathering place where lots of conversations are happening at the same time. My blogs are public speaking forums where I can put ideas out into the world. LinkedIn is for keeping in touch with professional contacts. Facebook is for friends and family.

What I put into my Facebook network will not be appropriate for LinkedIn and perhaps vice versa. I choose not to share who I had drinks with on the open networks, as a general rule. 

If I were a health provider, I would choose to not link to patients on Facebook. LinkedIn would be a gray area. Blogs and Twitter would be open but I would not discuss any personally identifying information on those networks. If a patient were to contact me through an open network, I would politely direct them into a private communication channel. If a patient were to contact me through Facebook, I would decline the link and add in a brief sentence that I use this for close friends and family only.

On a blog or Twitter post, I would encourage people to communicate specifics privately but be willing to have general discussions.

I'd be interested in hearing any thoughts or experiences other people have had or ways you're using these networks.

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           Rockmelt Icon

Got an invite to Rockmelt this afternoon courtesy of Kurt Collins (@timesync) and since it is supposed to be the new social web experience, I downloaded it. First though, I had to get through the slightly confusing invite experience. If I were not on the phone with Kurt while he was inviting me we may not have figured out how it worked. You send an invite to a friend, that friend has to click on www.rockmelt.com, connect via Facebook Connect, and agree to use Facebook Connect to sign up for beta. The original inviter then has to go back into Rockmelt and click "hook'em up" once the friend's name shows up.

Rockmelt crashed the first time I launched the browser, which is always a bad way to start with a new program. I opened up the two webmail systems that I use and another tab in the same window for browsing. I sign in to Twitter three times and get the ever spinning circle. The Facebook integration is better, it is fairly robust, meaning I saw status messages.

My major complaint is performance since when I was running those 3 tabs, the browser froze and took my MacBook with it. I had to quit Rockmelt and restart the computer before I could type in to other services, like Seesmic Desktop or Safari. The second complaint I have is I was looking for people to invite and clicked on a few names on the side. I couldn't tell who was already in the system and didn't want to send duplicates to people who likely already had an invite from other friends. Wouldn't you know, even without hitting the button that sends a message, just because I clicked on a Facebook friend's name from the invite box meant that I ACTUALLY INVITED THEM. It also meant that I couldn't remember who I invited because I THOUGHT I was just testing out the invite functionality so the system would prompt me for confirmation. I had to search through the list and look for the "Follow up" button to see who the lucky three were and then actually send messages. One person that I inadvertently invited would never even bother downloading this and I knew that. I had clicked on their name to see what the invite behavior of Rockmelt was for someone who I knew would not have been in the first wave of invites vs people I suspected were already in the system. 

Bottom line,my assessment is it's too early to see what the best practices are for making browsing social and it's unclear if Rockmelt has it right. From the way they are handling invites, I think there's a long way to go before the experience becomes one that I'd want to use every day. They do have a great icon though, I have to admit.

More to come later, when I have had a little more time to play with it.

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While teaching a session on Twitter and blogs for healthcare at the Center for Public Health at the Berkeley School of Public Health I met a two employees from Practice Fusion who invited me to their office to talk about their EHR on the web. During the course of our discussions I realized that I didn't have a good grasp of what kinds of laws or regulations would apply to patient data and the assurances of my hosts that they were taking their model from the financial services industry did not fill me with much confidence. I know trying to correct an error in my credit report was a labyrinthine process that took months and I'm not sure if it ever got cleared up.

In an effort to understand the data ownership and rights, I called Kaiser Wahab, an IP lawyer with many years of experience. He corrected my misunderstandings and added some thoughts of his own. He told me that according to the law, no one can own facts - the fact that you are diagnosed with diabetes is not, under the law, something that can be owned. The written RECORDS of the diagnosis and treatments a patient undergoes can be owned and therefore sold, provided there are no privacy laws that prohibit it.

I also talked to Will Crawford, a Health IT expert with Children's Hospital in Boston, who asked the question, do doctors realize the access and rights that they are giving to a private company? How comfortable will they be with their patient data, even if depersonalized and aggregated, being sold to the highest bidder?

Questions I have: Do we want a private company that is not being paid by our healthcare provider to have our health information? Do we want private companies that do not have to disclose any financial information helping to shape health data access policy that will affect us all?

Do we want to have access to aggregate health information to those who can afford it? How much of the access to this data that should be a public good be owned by a private entity?

In the new paradigm where the effective cost of digitized information is free, does it still make sense to stick to the old idea of having health information be concentrated in the hands of doctors, clinicians, insurance companies, and anyone that can afford it?

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Sprint had its Developer Conference in Silicon Valley over the past few days and one of the themes was developer relations. There was even a WIP UnPanel: Building a Blueprint for the Best Developer Program. Most of the time was spent in question and answer format, welcoming audience comments.

The five UnPanelists were:

Caroline Lewko, CEO, WIP

Carlo Longino, Community Manager, WIP

Patrick Mork, CMO, GetJar

Mike Rowehl, Founder, Mobile Monday Silicon Valley

Nathan Smith, Sprint Group Manager, Application Developer Program

The discussion centered around how Sprint could make it easier for individual developers. The way the question was being posed, it was the technology solutions that was the focus. What was missing from the discussion was how to foster a viable self-sustaining community from the human standpoint.

The solution to building developer communities isn't to focus on the "How" but the "Why" and the "What". Why should a developer join? What is the quality of the information or relationships? Focusing on the technology that is used leads to the "Build it and they will come." syndrome. For the community to be successful, the basic mechanics of allowing people to connect need to be there, having organized information, and user experience are nice to have. Looking at building communities from a technology standpoint sets up a false discussion. Ultimately the tools that people use to talk to each other is the means but cannot take the place of the content and value of the person to person relationships.

As you build these technologies, focus on the ultimate goal of creating a space for the discussions to happen, the medium will not drive conversation, only good old fashioned community building will.

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See the full gallery on Posterous

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See the full gallery on Posterous

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Wanted to give a sense of perspective as we're talking about social media in healthcare.

At the Kaiser Garfield Center again, the first time I was here was last October for my second Healthcamp. The first one was in Toronto barely a month before, a day prior to Medicine 2.0 and I'm amazed by the difference a little more than half a year later makes in the healthcare social media space. 

I'm amazed, now there's @kpthrive, @kpnewscenter, @kpgarfield and most everyone at the Ragan Healthcare Communicator's Summit are on Twitter. There's a lot of talk about multi-channel communications, being authentic, using video, YouTube, Facebook, RSS. 

Healthcare has more than a toe in the water now, excited to be part of what's happening. What can be done to get information out to keep people healthy is just starting. Can't wait to see where we are in another nine months.

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Original thoughts posted last night on http://chiah.posterous.com/, edited and reposted here.

There's been a lot of talk about making the online experience hyperlocal, location based services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite are hot, Facebook, Twitter, Google are all rolling out geolocation features. All of these technologies are available, there's already questions being asked (here and here) in the blogosphere, "How can we use location based services for health?" 

Didn't have a good answer for location and healthcare- until now. It's not the same kind of thinking that other people have been thinking about with a "location based service", but it is important to have a bounded area and a community.

I asked via Twitter if there's information out there that would tell me what kinds of communicable diseases are being diagnosed around me because it would be useful information to have. Started thinking about this because I had a fever of unknown origin this past weekend and the symptoms were general- low grade fever, headache, slight weakness, tiny bit of a dry cough- but there was not a good way to know what the likelihood of each possible virus/bacteria/other is.  

In an effort to figure out what diseases was going around, I did a quick little search and turned up an article that there's a 6X increase in whooping cough in the Bay Area and I started thinking, why isn't there a site that lets you search instances of diagnosed cases of communicable diseases based on location. It wouldn't need to be very granular, anything within a 25-50 mile radius of a location that a user specifies would be sufficient. 

Here's the argument that I have for providing this information on a website:

• Public can use it to see what diseases are prevalent or becoming so and make wise decisions, like avoiding large parties when there's an outbreak of flu.
• Clinicians could use this information in narrowing down disease possibilities.
• Public health agencies could get in front of a pandemic.

If we just started with one semi-large local healthcare organization already using electronic health records (EHR's) that would be willing to put out anonymized data with numbers of cases of communicable diseases seen in one of the larger clinics, it would give the community insight into how to keep themselves healthier. Another idea is to take the diseases that are already being tracked by local public health agencies and making those numbers more public. Using the press to get information out seems like an inefficient and haphazard way to let all members of a community (caregivers and the public) know about an outbreak, it would make a lot more sense to make this information more accessible. This way, I can manage my risk by avoiding places or behaviors that up my likelihood of contracting a disease known to be occurring and allow me to make more intelligent decisions regarding care should I become ill.

Forget mining Google searches for flu, let's go with a much more solid number of "How many people were diagnosed with flu in your neighborhood?" Why shouldn't health be hyperlocal? 

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People often wonder, how do we take a corporate blog and tie it to ROI? Is there a RTE (Reason to Exist) for a organization to have a blog?What are the possible metrics that we can tie to blogging efforts and does it actually translate to adding to the bottom line?

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During the session How to Leverage Online PR with Social Media at Social Media Strategies Conference in Santa Clara today a radical idea was proposed, that 5 years from now, we'll no longer be having Social Media Conferences, in the same way we don't have email or voicemail discussions, because people understand how to use these tools to communicate.

The issue I have with the statement "People will understand how to use these tools." is social isn't about the tools. Sometimes I feel like a broken record repeating myself when I repeat, "It's not about the tools, the technology or the platform, it's about the people." While I agree that the tools will be ubiquitous the sociological underpinnings of how people are using these tools will still need further study and understanding. 

We are in the early days of this new technology and companies are scrambling to understand how this will change their businesses, I think there will be unintended consequences in the same way that smart phones or email has changed the face of how business is done. What it all still boils down to though, are human beings and how they behave.

Since there isn't a direct link to the session on the conference website, here's the list of panelists and moderator that I copied.

How to Leverage Online PR with Social Media
The session will feature a panel of industry experts sharing their ideas on how to leverage online PR efforts using social media to extend reach and target the right audiences.
Jiyan Wei, Director of Product Management, PRWeb
Greg Jarboe, President, SEO-PR
Louis Gray, Founder, Louisgray.com
Moderator: Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher

What do you think? Will we still be talking about social 5 years from now?

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ad:tech 2010: Advertising on Twitter, the Future is Here for Brands (video)

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Last week Alex Kawas and I taught a workshop on Twitter and blogs to a room full of healthcare professionals at the Center for Health Leaders, based out of UC Berkeley's School of Public Health. I realized about a minute into the workshop that there isn't a explanation of Twitter for the beginner that is easy to understand and just enough to get someone started on the platform but not so information much it's overwhelming. This post is intended to be just enough information for a person who has never used Twitter before to start- and learn along the way.

The way I started thinking about Twitter and a simple tweet was IM'ing or texting a group of people at the same time with the same information. This information could be a sentence or a link. Just start with that IM idea in mind when you are writing your first tweets.

Here's my very quick guide to Twitter and what all the commonly used symbols and characters mean. I've included links to deeper explanations of each term but this is really meant to be a 2 minute guide and not an exhaustive resource.

Definitions:

• tweet: communication of 140 characters that is sent through the Twitter service
• follower: someone who opts to receive your tweets
• follow: you opt to receive their tweets 
• @<username>: a public reply to a specific person (e.g. @chiah for me), the tweet will show up in search, on the person's Twitter page (www.twitter.com/<username>, so for me, it would be www.twitter.com/chiah). 
• DM or direct message: a private reply to a specific person, the tweet will not show up in search or on the person's Twitter page. You can only send a DM to someone who is following you and this IS NOT a reciprocal relationship, meaning if I am following @twitter they can send me a DM but since they are not following me, I cannot send @twitter a DM
• # or hashtag: a tag or keyword that will come up in search. Most often used to label a tweet as belonging to a certain event or topic.
• desktop or mobile clients: instead of going to twitter.com, you can use other interfaces either on a computer or on a mobile phone to see tweets

These simple terms should be enough to get started tweeting, for more detailed guides, Mashable has quite a few that will keep you busy for hours. 

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Waiting for full sequence?

 Photo credit: Julie Blaustein

Last night I had the chance to cover a Personal Genomics: What Consumers and Investors Want to Know panel at the Jewish Community Federation. You can watch the entire conversation here: http://www.livestream.com/sfjcf

Panelists:
Michael Goldberg, Partner, Mohr Davidow Ventures
David Magnus, PhD, Chair, Program in Regenerative Medicine Sub-Committee on Bioethics and Conflict of Interest, Stanford University
Hugh Rienhoff, MD, Founder of MyDaughtersDNA.org 
Ashley Gould, General Counsel, 23andMe
Moderator:
Robert Blum, President and Chief Executive Officer, Cytokinetics and Chair, Business Leadership Council of the Jewish Community Federation

• Michael Goldberg stated the businesses Mohr Davidow are involved with are physician mediated, if not, then genetic counselors help interpret the results. David Magnus brought up ethical issues such as data ownership, clinical utility of SNP tests. 
• Hugh Rienhof gave us an update on his quest to find a diagnosis for his daughter by sequencing genes: hers, their family and other volunteers. 
• Ashley Gould said 23andMe is not interested in the technology but rather the genetic data and data interpretation with an emphasis on research to make personalized medicine a reality. 
• David gave the strongest opinion, declaring that the data from Navigenics and 23andMe as clinically useless since it's "just a drop in the bucket." Ashley seconded David's opinion, saying for the second time in the evening that data from 23andMe is not meant to be used for clinically relevant health decisions and encouraged anyone with concerns to consult a doctor.

The panel was in agreement that full sequencing is the future, it's not a matter of how but rather of when. Michael Goldberg addressed the question of how to make money from this new world by ending with, "We want to make sure that we don't get ahead of what society is ready for." The take home from the panel is "Yes, full sequence is the next step!", answering the question at the beginning of this post, "Waiting for full sequence?" 

On a bigger level though, a small instantaneous community sprang up because of our shared interest in personal genomics. Though this event happened in Palo Alto, CA in a space that is constrained to a few hundred people in the auditorium, technology has made it possible to have almost instantaneous communications. We had real-time discussions over Twitter and in the chatroom from people thousands of miles away and internationally. Just glancing over who I talked to, the group consisted of a Health 2.0 activist, a government employee, a lawyer specializing in genetics and a human/computer interaction technologist. The panelists came to this event with their lens: Michael because he invests in the space, Hugh because of his daughter, David for the societal issues personalized genomics brings up and Ashley because of her father. The people following the live stream and on Twitter also came for their own reasons, one person because he is adopted and has no family history to rely on at the doctor's office, another because of her interest in patient advocacy. I'm sure everyone in the audience had their own reasons for attending, as many as the number of people who were listening. This event brought people with a common interest together and even if none of us ever meet again, new social technology made is possible and easy to connect and reconnect. The next challenging facing us is how we use this new socialized web to move whatever needles we choose. 

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I had the chance to ask a few questions of Tim Thomas, CIO of Local Motors Inc., a fascinating company at the edge of crowdsourcing, design and real production products. There is a thriving community of designers and car enthusiasts involved with the company.

The Rally Fighter Tour stopped off in San Francisco and I had a chance to see CEO Jay Rogers on a panel speaking on how the new social technologies can lead to real world products for Social Media Week 2010.

According to Tim, the beginnings of a community started with a placeholder website that interested people could join an email list and be notified when the site officially launched. The community started to build on its own when the website launched and members could enter a series of competitions- they could upload images and share ideas. Now Local Motors Website is now a community of transportation designers and enthusiasts can gather, share ideas and get feedback. With approximately 5000 active members, there is a vibrant community that gather online and offline.

Local motors invited other car and design communities to participate in competitions. They have sent representatives to American transportation design schools, brought the Rally Fighter and involved the students. In addition, they also have other offline events where they invite local enthusiasts from Rhode Island, Connecticut to the shop for "Burgers and Welding".

In my experience, these real life events are key to creating a more significant community. Add that key component to YouTube, Flickr, website, Facebook and Twitter presence, this is one company that is doing it right.

Here's the interview with Tim:

1. Tell us a little about the philosophy behind Local Motors.

Local Motors' mission is to lead the next generation of automotive manufacturing, design, and technology in order to revolutionize the industry with game-changing efficient vehicles and an unprecedented standard of customer service.  In order to accomplish this, we have a high degree of interaction and integration with our community.  It is our philosophy to provide an open, collaborative environment where there is mutual symbiosis between Local Motors and our community.  In our open source model, transportation designers, engineers and enthusiasts can share their concepts and designs for feedback, for collaborating on designs with other members, and for the opportunity for selected designs to be built by Local Motors.  Conversely, Local Motors makes our our technical vehicle specifications and open-source chassis data available to specialty equipment manufacturers so they can manufacture and sell custom parts to spec for our vehicles. 

Our product development process is also open, displaying revisions and milestones as they occur on our website.  This is the absolute opposite of traditional automotive manufacturers that "take a few high-profile designers behind locked doors, and 5 years later pull off the sheet to show the public what they can all buy".  We are as involved with our community as they are with us.  We educate them and celebrate their progress and their successes both on and off of our website, and they contribute their perspectives and ideas with each other, and with our product.  Beyond that, future customers contribute their ideas and suggestions in the vehicle development process, helping shape the product they are going to buy.  It's a win-win situation all around.

2. How much of this came out of the DIY movement?

The Local Motors Vehicle Build experience is one huge differentiator that Local Motors provides our customers, however Local Motors did not come out of a DIY movement.  DIY is not new - I watched my father build a heathkit stereo in the 1960s.  That said, DIY has recently significantly increased in popularity, partially due to the emergence of businesses that make small-scale customized manufacturing available to individuals and small businesses.  Local Motors in particular does have significant domain knowledge of DIY.  Our engineers have designed and manufactured vehicles at Factory Five Racing, a very successful DIY-racecar manufacturer that engineers their vehicles from the ground up.

The DIY movement is a huge inspiration.  Whether you're building cars, airplanes, computers or radios - if you build it yourself, you care more.  You learn more. This experience is essential to building not only relationships but a sustainable process; if you build a Rally Fighter with your children, chances are you will want to keep it forever.  

3. How many people were involved initially? Now?

The idea began to foster while Jay Rogers, CEO, was a Marine in Iraq.  Jay had always loved cars and was hugely influenced by his grandfather who was owner of Indian Motorcycles.  It started with one person wanting to impact the American car industry in a positive way; cars are one of the largest end uses of oil, and if Jay could reduce our need for foreign oil, reduce the need for military solutions, while building cars he loved - that's what he wanted to do.  So he went to Harvard Business School, met his co-founder Jeff Jones and set the business plan for Local Motors. 

The initial efforts of the business were to create a product plan for the first vehicle while simultaneously building out our website in order to grow our community.  At that point there was Jay, the CEO, Karin Ostebo Finance/HR/Office Manger, me and a developer named Andy Cronk building the website, 2 vehicle engineers Mike Pisani and Dave Riha and one Community Evangelist, Ariel Ferreira.  The community grew slowly and has since grown to over 5,000 members from around the globe.  When the Rally Fighter was chosen for development we hired full time designers and now work with two, Aurel Francois and Nyko De Peyer.  Both Aurel and Nyko were hired from the community.  We also work with an excellent team of contractors who help with everything from fabrication and modeling to video production. 

4. What do you think was the turning point (if there was one), where you, as an organization realized "Wow, this community sourced design for real world products is working!"

We have always been confident that it would work.  The turning point you ask about came for other people - the press, skeptics, our community members who wanted to participate in designing a car that would actually be built... they mostly seemed to be cautiously optimistic.  The biggest turning point has been the physical proof - that we actually did build exactly what we promised, on target and on budget.  That and about 60 Rally Fighters have been reserved to date! 

5. You have a great social media presence, I've found you on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, your own website- could you tell us a little more about the goals of putting all this great content out and how you chose the tools?

Really we want to share as much as possible to increase involvement and feedback from our community.  We look at community in a holistic way; Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube all help to direct traffic and participation to local-motors.com where people can vote and help design the cars they love. 

As you point out, it is our strategy to maintain a presence where our community and fans can be found.  This is especially important these days, because we now live in a world where people are often likely to seek product advice from each other rather than base purchasing decisions on brand loyalty.  Sites like Facebook and Youtube provide access to both trusted peers and consensus opinions of "the masses", two important sources of influence over present day consumers.  As a result, this is one reason we are committed to providing content on sites like Facebook, Youtube and Flickr.  Another reason is that with the increasing viewership and viral nature of these sites, this is a great way to introduce our products and company to untapped audiences.  Ultimately, those who are interested in learning more, want to get involved with our collaborative experience or who want to become customers will come to our website or visit us in person.

The bulk of our exposure, however, seems to be growing outside of these types of social media sites.  We are getting an increasing amount of great media coverage by sources like Wired (http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_newrevolution/) and Jalopnik (http://jalopnik.com/5398864/local-motors-rally-fighter-the-first+ever-creative-commons-car) for example.  Our CEO, Jay Rogers, is also regularly asked to participate in highly visible business and social media conferences as a panelist.  Additionally, a significant amount of exposure comes from physical exposure.  Our Rally Fighter debuted at the SEMA auto show in Las Vegas, and we have taken it to several off-road rally races, and are currently taking it to the community on a national tour (http://www.local-motors.com/static.php?p=RFTour) so that people can kick the tires and talk to us in person, something we feel is even more powerful than on-line exposure in building excitement and trust.

But to finish your answer, we are always exploring new tools, usually free, that will simplify the dissemination of content.  We use free tools like Seesmic desktop, Tweetdeck and CoTweet to make sure we keep up with Twitter.  We are now using Pingg to schedule events because if it's integration to many resources such as Facebook and Google Calendar.  Shortly we will release Facebook Connect on our website in order to leverage Facebook's social graph and to empower our members to flow content in both directions between Facebook and our website.

We also build some of what we need.  For example, we use Google Apps because it works for us (and it's also free).  As a result, we can build a tour calendar for the Rally Fighter in Google, entering locations and times into the calendar, but then we built an interface between them so that the calendar automatically feeds Google Maps, pinpointing the locations of the events.  We have also integrated the conversation on our website into a twitter account @lm_car_chat, and we have integrated this into bit.ly so that each tweet links back to that discussion on our website, and we display #rallyfighter tweets on the tour page.  Any fresh content that we can automate like this is a huge time and cost savings.

 6. How many people do you have creating content for the social media/community sites? 

Internally, I would say that 5 of us are actively contributing content to our website and social media sites, and we also have 4 people from a partner firm called Kinetic Fin that contributes as well.  There are 3 people who are tasked with updating each of the sites, but this only amounts to a relatively small portion of their day.  Everyone on our team can be reached via Local Motors, and several via Facebook & Twitter.  

Lucky for us, our story is one that people want to tell, and as a result, most of the content is created by bloggers, reporters and our community members.  

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I had a great opportunity to speak at BIL:PIL (video link here and also embedded below, thanks WHITECOAT Strategies), the unconference organized by Jonathan Sheffi as the sister conference to TED:MED in San Diego at the end of October 2009. A few weeks before the event I decided to talk without slides, removing a speaker/audience barrier that is present even at an unconference. It was an intense and interesting experience given the events of the day before, but I was thankful to have the opportunity to listen, speak with and be supported by a community of healthcare game changers.

I'm passionate about the topic of communities; I have been a part of online communities for the past 20 years and have built a few different ones that have thrived. It was a pleasure to be able to share my experience and at the same time learn from others. 

Gilles Frydman was there to talk about ACOR, his cancer support communities, sharing the more than 14 years of experience in patient centric communities. Jen McCabe spoke passionately about patient medical data access and healthcare engagement. David Hale gave a great talk on breaking the chain in toxic events. Ash Damle gave us an overview of clinical decision support and where he is taking Medgle. Dr. Val gave us the reasons and data on patient engagement. David Rosenman of the Mayo Clinic spoke on the changes in healthcare. 

Thanks to everyone who came, discussed and shared ideas, it has been great to be part of the conversation- and dare I say? A community.

BIL:PIL 2009 - Chia Hwu from WHITECOAT Strategies on Vimeo.

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